Starting Spring Seedlings

Posted on March 17, 2019

Despite waking up to snow falling yet again the other morning, spring does appear to finally be here in the Seattle area. We just happen to be at the right elevation in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains that we got snow that was sticking in the morning that then promptly melted quickly. But the forecast is showing a high of 70 degrees that I’m so excited about, that I’m planning to take the day off if that does pan out.

We finished digging the main garden beds and there’s still a smaller one I need to dig for my little pumpkin patch but most of the hard work of digging, removing boulders in the ground and filtering out large pebbles is done. Next we need to put in cement bricks or pressure treated wood around each bed and fill them in with dirt.

The ground is so incredibly rocky out here that the amount of rocks we removed left quite a bit of space that the dirt won’t fill in. I’ve never encountered so many rocks.

Ryan picked out a few tools to help with our seedlings this year and it already feels like we’re ahead of the game since we didn’t start planting anything until May last year.

We bought a grow light, warming mats and seedling trays.

Shop Seedling Starter Supplies

Within 2 days of planting the first set of seeds in the trays they started germinating. The warming mat is really the magic piece here. And here, 6 days later nearly everything has sprouted but there a few cells that don’t quite have anything sprouting up yet that I can see.

The most aggressive and eager seeds were the hibiscus ones I planted. They were the first to shoot out of the soil and really take off. I had to move two of the little baby seedlings to new containers because of how much they grew in a matter of days.

I’m very excited for my hibiscus plants as my friends make a delicious habanero hibiscus simple syrup for tequila cocktails.

Buying Seeds

In the autumn I purchased garlic to plant from a company called Territorial Seed Company, based out of Oregon. They sent me a seed catalogue over the winter because of that purchase and my eyes lit up looking through the catalogue. There are SO MANY varieties of things and you can buy seeds or plants (for certain produce & herbs) that I decided to order everything through them instead of going to a big box hardware and garden store, which of course has its uses but variety of seeds is not one of them.

Next Steps

Like I said we need to get the garden beds closed off and filled back in with dirt and my goal for the weekend was to build a trellis for my cucumber plants (but that was disrupted by our washer drain and a plumbing issue.) Then we still need to purchase some raspberry and strawberry plants. Those are the only items I didn’t order because the number of plants in an order was quite a bit more than we need at the moment.